Hustlers (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Megan Feeney

Produced by Jessica Elbaum, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, and Jennifer Lopez; written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, based on “The Hustlers at Scores” by Jessica Pressler; cinematography by Todd Banhazl; edited by Kayla Emter; production design by Jane Musky; costume design by Mitchell Travers; starring Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Cardi B, and Lizzo. Color, 110 min. An STX Entertainment release.

Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers is inspired by a true story about a group of strippers who successfully conspired to fleece their Wall Street banker clients after the 2008 financial collapse. According to the film’s publicity and plenty of critical acclaim, the film is serving up a feast of female empowerment and a scathing critique of (gendered) economic inequality. Boasting an all-female marquee that includes superstar Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, along with music industry heavy hitters Cardi B and Lizzo, Hustlers is a movie made by women and for women, we are told. It’s about women owning their power and turning the tables on the patriarchy. The film’s stripper-protagonists are modern-day Robin Hoods, stealing from filthy-rich misogynistic cads in order to keep their struggling families afloat. With all the subtlety of a strip club billboard, Hustlers taps into the zeitgeist, especially the #MeToo movement and popular political candidates’ language about a “rigged economy.” 

I hate to say it, but I think we’re being hustled. Sold on empowerment and social criticism, we find ourselves once again subject to big-budget Hollywood’s disempowering male and consumerist gaze and its propensity for cashing in on contemporary sociopolitical anxieties while buffing them into shiny products that reiterate the status quo. 

The come-on has been seductive. After all, in an industry where women direct fewer than ten percent of films produced, Scafaria’s position at the helm does amount to an advance. And, in interviews, she professes to take seriously her responsibility to represent women and make movies for them. In Hustlers she set out to subvert the sexist representation of strippers in film and television. For too long, she complains, strippers have been portrayed from “one side,” namely from the point of view of the male clientele, as nameless plot-irrelevant objects offered up for the pleasure of men (as characters and audiences). She cites the embodiment of feminist film theory’s founding insights about the tyranny of the male gaze in commercial cinema—a male gaze that teaches women in general that their value is measured by their sexual attractiveness to men. In contrast, Scafaria wants to show us stripping from “the eyes of the women” and for “the female gaze,” to show us strippers’ perspectives and their full humanity, to give us strippers with whom female audiences can identify. She gives them backstories, subjectivity, agency, and athleticism. To highlight this athleticism, Scafaria says she consciously mimicked the style of sports movies. Her strippers become the Rocky Balboas of pole dancing, not just objects to be consumed but athletes to be admired and respected for their hard work, strength, and talent. Moreover, by moving strippers from backdrop objects to protagonist subjects, Scafaria moves the actresses playing them to top billing. There is no need here for higher-paid male stars to headline, least of all when you have the tractor-beam draw of “J.Lo,” as the world knows Jennifer Lopez’s celebrity persona, a powerful media mogul for nearly two decades. 

Also promising is the film’s source material, by which I mean both the real-life strippers who authored the film’s plot in the first place (though at least one has complained about not being paid for the rights to her story) and journalist Jessica Pressler’s incisive 2015 New York Magazine article about them, “The Hustlers at Scores.” After the 2008 economic crash undercut New York City’s once-thriving strip club scene, struggling exotic dancers Rosie Keo and Samantha Barbash devised a plan to cut out “the House” (which derived profit from their exploitative underpayment) and to extract big money directly from the strippers’ clients, men who flaunted their exorbitant Wall Street-derived wealth and, often enough, their impulse to debase the strippers, to treat them like “trash.” Keo and Barbash’s scheme involved reeling clients into the club, drugging them with a ketamine and MDMA-laced cocktail, and then draining their credit cards. 

As Pressler’s piece explores, this scheme actualized some third-wave feminists’ ideal of the stripper as sex-positive liberated and liberating avenger, reclaiming female sexuality as a weapon—used by rather than against women—to wrest power and financial autonomy from men. Rather than mere objects of men’s sexual appetites, Keo and Barbash actively manipulated their clients’ lust and profligacy for their own benefit. Mastering the terms of our “fucked up” (Keo’s words) Social Darwinian culture, they were prey turned predator. They were the consumed turned consumer, gleefully treating themselves—and the prostitutes (Pressler’s word) they enlisted to help them—to Louboutin stilettos and Gucci handbags.

Thankfully, though, like many feminist critics before her, Pressler points out that strippers make for rather problematic, even perverse figures of liberation. The version of female empowerment embodied by strippers is superficial at best and delusional at worst, something of a trick that presses women into collusion with the sexual and economic power of men. It is prostration before male sexual appetites masquerading as liberated female sexual expression, a model of false liberation that precludes more truly subversive and sustainable avenues of economic and political autonomy and power. Pressler makes this point with subtlety and wit. Like “an ornamental plant purposefully stunted to conform to a certain ideal,” she writes, strippers often modify their bodies for the male gaze which they (we) have internalized: enhancing breasts, injecting lips, extending eyelashes, going to great (and expensive) lengths to be desirable to men and, if they survive long enough in the industry, to put off the prospect of visible aging. Almost forty, Barbash herself was “ancient by stripper standards,” writes Pressler. “Recognizing that she may have crossed a plastic-surgery Rubicon and could scare off those unaccustomed to creatures of the night,” she used the pictures of younger women in her crew to lure their victims. 

Pressler is also wise to the fact that, generally speaking, stripping is less an expression of female entrepreneurship than it is an expression of economic marginalization, less a savvy leap at a promising opportunity than a risky grasp at a limited option. In an economy in which non-college-educated women are paid seventy-eight percent of what their male counterparts are paid, are more likely to be straddled with childcare costs and responsibilities, are more likely to be relegated to low-paying service jobs and to fall below the poverty line, the prospect of making hundreds of dollars in a few hours of stripping can be irresistible. Once in the industry, however, many strippers find themselves screwed, in ways both figurative and literal, as Pressler outlines. Seduced by a vision of dollars pouring in, they find the dollars pouring out, to pay house fees and to tip out other club employees, including bartenders, servers, and DJs. Then, there can be a powerful temptation to cross the line into more lucrative behind-the-scenes sex acts, like three-hundred-dollar blowjobs, according to Pressler—to say nothing of reports of high rates of chemical dependency and sexual assault (aka “occupational violence”) endemic to strip club environments. 

Moreover, Pressler questions the ideal of the stripper as figure of economic empowerment on another front. Even when Keo and Barbash were raking in the dough, Keo did not feel liberated. Lucidly, she described to Pressler feeling trapped on the hamster wheel of the very conspicuous consumption she despised in her male clientele (having to stay in the game, to make the bank, to buy the luxury goods, that failed to make them happy) and the exploitative labor practices she despised in the clubs, taking far bigger cuts than the other women she and Barbash recruited. And finally, Pressler emphasizes that these strippers’ empowerment was not only limited and unsatisfying but also fleeting. Inevitably, they were caught and thrown in jail for their transgressions. Pressler’s article ends in a jail cell on Rikers Island, where the incarcerated Barbash “resembled a deranged Rosie the Riveter in the leopard hair wrap she was arrested in.”

To her credit, Scafaria skillfully translates some of the cultural criticisms in Pressler’s article—and its strippers’ humanity—into her script for Hustlers. Like Pressler, Scafaria puts Rosie Keo front and center, though Scafaria changes her name to Destiny (played by Wu). In a smart device that literalizes the claim that this is a story told by women for women, Destiny narrates the film’s story to a female journalist (played by Julia Stiles). This does allow Scafaria to first present stripping to us from Destiny’s point of view. When the film opens in 2007, we join Destiny in a line of women that weaves through the club and onto the stage, where she is introduced as “the new girl,” a fresh piece of meat, experiencing the male gaze as a humiliation. We accompany Destiny as she struggles amateurishly to titillate her clients, reluctantly hands most of her gains to the club manager, takes the bus home at dawn, collapses into bed, then awakes mid-afternoon to return to the club, after handing over the rest of her gains to her grandmother. Their economic hardship is emphasized, and empathy is generated when Destiny notices Grandma’s missing necklace, evidently pawned. And this is during the good times. 

When the economy crashes in September 2008, coincident with an unplanned pregnancy, Destiny’s plight becomes desperate. The film then cuts to 2011. Destiny is raising a toddler daughter alone, still supporting Grandma, and unable to find “respectable” employment due to her circumscribed education (a GED) and résumé (a list of strip club jobs). Lacking options, Destiny returns to the club, where conditions have declined in ways outlined in Pressler’s article. Destiny finds a bevy of young Russian beauties, unable to speak English but willing to undersell their competition, engaging in behind-the-curtain sex acts while the club turns a blind eye. It is not long before Destiny is pressed into the same, snorting cocaine to endure the humiliation and then stiffed (pun intended) by a loathsome client. This is the last straw of the economic marginalization and depraved male behavior that justifies the coming scam. At this precise moment, Destiny is reunited with the club’s ultramagnetic queen bee, Ramona (played by Lopez), who is already running said scam. And, if Destiny’s backstory implies a critique of (gendered) economic inequality, it is Ramona who gets to declare that critique outright.

Convincing Destiny to join her criminal enterprise, Ramona argues forcefully, “We got to start thinking like these Wall Street guys. You see what they did to this country? They stole from everybody. Hardworking people lost everything and not one of these douchebags went to jail, not one. Is that fair?” If Wall Street “assholes” stole from The People, there can be nothing wrong with stealing it back, Ramona reasons. America’s unequal dog-eat-dog culture, she pontificates later, operates like a strip club: you’re either “the people tossing the money” or “the people doing the dance.” When her co-conspirators balk at the notion of drugging their marks, Ramona reminds them again of the structural inequality they are subverting: “The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.” 

For all the ways that Scafaria translates Pressler’s social and economic criticisms into her script, however, and for all the ways the film’s publicity touts its message of female empowerment and its Robin Hood-esque socioeconomic critique, the finished film does not deliver. 

Take Scafaria’s stated commitment to upend the representation of the stripper. It’s true that she gives us stripper as athlete, at least once. In one scene, we watch from Destiny’s point of view with great admiration as Ramona, dressed in relatively sturdy athleisure, coaches the “new girl” in gravity-defying pole dancing mechanics. But that scene is an exception that proves the rule, and a mere side note to the scene that precedes it, the much publicized one in which J.Lo arrives onscreen—the moment the (strip club and movie) audience has been awaiting (and, really, this scene establishes that J.Lo’s star burns too brightly to be dissolved into her character). Wearing little more than “dental floss,” as she coyly teases in interviews, J.Lo performs a pole dance for the ages, as men cheer and throw bills. Lopez’s performance here is magnificent, but it is not subversive. It is, in fact, a perfect expression of big-budget Hollywood’s impulse to spectacularize the commoditized female body—the more flesh the better. And it announces that Hustlers, especially through its long and giddy representation of the pre-crash club, is happy to trade in this currency. Throughout the film, in fact, Hustlers can seem not so much designed to change the quality of strippers’ representation as the quantity. We just get more strippers’ bodies: not just on stage, but in VIP rooms, in dressing rooms, and in their homes. Even the film’s vaunted female camaraderie gets played for the male gaze, as pairs of stripper-besties undress and touch each other for the pleasure of their clientele, and the film’s audience. Scafaria claims she knew what she was doing here. In interviews, she describes her use of the “sexy and fun” stuff as “a bit of a Trojan horse,” strategically “toy[ing] with the male gaze” to sneak in the female empowerment. If so, Hustlers gives the impression that Scafaria got carried away by her own horse and stuck in enemy territory. 

The film’s publicity also evidences this hijacking by the male gaze. Even as its stars are celebrated as smart and savvy industry leaders, attention is ever turned back to the consumable bodies of Hustlers’s “stacked cast,” a favorite double entendre of the trade press. Squeezed into body-con dresses and torturously high stilettos on red carpets, the actresses share titillating anecdotes about what it was like to get lap dance lessons from Cardi B, once a real-life stripper who laments she couldn’t do much onscreen stripping, sidelined as she was by recent breast augmentation surgery and liposuction. 

So, while Pressler’s article points to the perversity of female body modification, Hustlers celebrates it. And not just in Cardi B’s self-proclaimed “titties.” Look at Jennifer Lopez, whose chiseled and unwrinkled nonaging body is at the center of the film and its publicity. Emphasized everywhere in the press, Lopez is fifty, and a marvel to behold. Intellectually, we all know that her pentagenarian hotness can be credited, at least in part, to Botox, fillers, and/or plastic surgery—tastefully and expensively administered to avoid crossing over Pressler’s “plastic surgery Rubicon”—as well as Olympian exercise regimens and a team of hair and makeup artists. But this doesn’t stop regular women from feeling the pressure to achieve the same, an anxiety exploited in Hustlers’ publicity, featuring Internet links to J.Lo’s preproduction fitness plan and no-sugar no-carb diet. As many a feminist has decried, this pressure drives women to pour money into ever-growing, multibillion-dollar diet, exercise, cosmetics, and plastic surgery industries. The expense of impossible beauty ideals long shaped by the male gaze—along with the persistent gendered wage gap—helps explain why American women are more likely to carry credit card debt than are American men.

In fact, maybe it was the casting of J.Lo that doomed Hustlers to its male and consumerist gaze reversion. She is just too fabulous in the big-budget Hollywood way. To understand what I mean, try this thought experiment: what if Hustlers had cast a real-life forty-year-old stripper to play Ramona, in the neorealist style (like Roma’s protagonist played by indigenous nonprofessional actor Yalitza Aparicio)? Or even if, to earn her Oscar buzz, Lopez had pulled the usual Oscar-bait physical transformation, truly approximating Samantha Barbush’s appearance (I refer you to Google), like Christian Bale morphing into Dick Cheney through weight gain, prosthetics, and speech and behavior imitation. Hustlers would have been an altogether different film, and one that Scafaria and the film’s production companies made a (decent) bet would not have as much box office appeal. And so, instead, Hustlers gives us a hyperbolically glamorous international superstar who can’t help but make stripping look glamorous, her megawatt star obviating all the caveats raised in Pressler’s article. In two short scenes, Lopez does channel her 'Jenny-from-the-Block/Bronx' days when when Ramona is forced to work unglamorous, non-strip-club jobs. But this (glimpsed) version of Ramona feels little related to the monied Ramona, as comfortable as a born aristocrat in her designer threads and high-end kitchen in her well-appointed Upper East Side apartment. 

Which brings us to the other part of Hustlers’ hustle. The film claims to offer a critique of economic inequality, and those bad actor Wall Street boys whose greedy hustle threatened to bankrupt the country but then turns around and glamorizes ill-gained wealth gleefully and recklessly spent. While Pressler’s article jabs at conspicuous consumption as an ungratifying and soul-sucking trap, and while Scafaria injects a hint of this critique into Hustlers’ script (i.e., in a subtle side-eye Destiny gives Ramona for online shopping in the midst of an overdrugged client crisis; and when Ramona’s cash floats away in the air upon her arrest, like so much gold dust at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), most of the film glorifies its characters’ inflated bank accounts and the high-end consumer goods it affords them. Aside from the tasteful expensiveness of Ramona’s apartment, there are tracking shots of designer accessories on department store shelves and piles of expensive shoes in candy colors. There is sisterhood expressed through the gifting of designer handbags, chinchilla furs, and luxury SUVs. There are repeated shots of the stripper characters in Hervé Leger bandage dresses, stomping fiercely into bars, as if working a Paris runway. These stripper characters love their designer labels, ostentatiously announced: Louboutin, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Versace. And while there is clearly an intention here to poke fun at the strippers’ gaudiness, the impulse to satirize gets steamrolled by Hollywood’s impulse to sell, to make these goods covetable. Like the reversion to the male gaze, this impulse to the consumerist gaze is clarified in the film’s publicity, as it spotlights the film’s covetable fashions, along with the high-end labels its stars wear to press events—often accompanied with online shopping links. Again, this is a superficial version of female empowerment sold to us at a very high price. 

Yes, it’s good that Hustlers was made by women, and powerful well-paid ones at that. But is it made for women? Is it “empowering” for those of us not at the top of the film or music business, for those of us that don’t look like Hollywood movie stars, for those of us that age, for those of us that hope someday for more sustainable and truly subversive gains like pay equity, reasonable family leave policies, gender parity in high-paying professions, an end to workplace sexual harassment, and equal political representation? I don’t think so. In the end, Hustlers leaves me with the impression that the film’s creators—just like Ramona and her crew—don’t break the rules so much as bend them to their own profit. As a result, the version of female empowerment the film offers its female viewers—just like the empowerment experienced by Ramona and her crew—is illusory, unsatisfying, and fleeting. To accept it as the best that female audiences can ask of Hollywood is to be hustled. It asks us to do the dance and toss the money, deranged Rosie the Riveters indeed.

Megan Feeney has a PhD in American Studies (University of Minnesota) and is author of Hollywood in Havana: U.S. Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba Before 1959.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1